On Tue, Feb 2, 2016 at 10:58 PM, Tom Lane <t...@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote: > I've gotta go with the "paternalism" side of the argument here. Suppose > you configure your system to checkpoint once a year --- what is going to > happen when the year is up? Or when you try to shut it down? You *will* > regret such a setting. > > I don't think we should allow the checkpoint distances to be so large that > checkpoints don't happen in the normal course of events. I'd be okay with > the max being a day, perhaps.
If smart people[1] want to set checkpoint_timeout to a value higher than 1 day[2], then I think we should let them. I think what will happen if you set checkpoint_timeout to 1 year is that you will checkpoint solely based on WAL volume, which does not seem like a manifestly unreasonable thing to want. It's true that if you set BOTH max_wal_size AND checkpoint_timeout to $WAYTOOBIG then something bad might happen to you, but even such configurations are actually not totally crazy: for example, you could ingest data into a temporary PostgreSQL instance and then do logical replication from there to another cluster for permanent storage. You don't really need recovery or shutdown to happen in the lifetime of the cluster, so no harm, no foul. Now, you could also set such configuration settings in a situation where it will not work out well. But that is true of most configuration settings. -- Robert Haas EnterpriseDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com The Enterprise PostgreSQL Company [1] like Andres [2] see original post -- Sent via pgsql-hackers mailing list (pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-hackers